Re: Virtual Sharing Devices

[Nick Austin <nick.w.austin@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 10:28 PM, rb_ziggy <rb.lists@xxxxxxx>
wrote:
> I was just catching up on a podcast when this company
> (www.ncomputing.com) was mentioned.
>
> Allows multiple users to share one PC by using some virtualisation
software
> on the pc and a small device per user (either network attached or
direct
> attached) to connect multiple users (screen, keyboard, mouse) to the
same
> pc with their own virtual space/machine.

Until the 1970's that's the way almost all computing was done.
Operating Systems were considered to be one of two types, Single User
or Multi User.  See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user

This made sense when hardware was hugely expensive and the Central
Processing Unit had to sit inside it's own air-conditioning room.  The
ordinary user accessed the CPU via a dumb character-based terminal,
nowadays called the 'thin client'.

> And it struck me, could have very handy uses in a HA envt.

Things have moved on.  Everyone wants graphics these days and that
means that the 'thin client' is just a mini-PC.

You can still do it relatively cheaply using Linux.  Each clients
starts of in text-mode then runs telnet/ssh over ethernet to log into
the central processor.  You then run X11 (aka X Windows) to bring up
the desktop.  These are technologies that haven't changed in years so
you can apply updates to the central server without breaking the
clients.

Nick.


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